Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (52 page)

This was Yuri’s last letter. Sometime that spring he died of dysentery. When Yuri’s letters stopped coming, Anna became desperate. She began writing letters to the gulag administration, to camp directors, and to various Soviet officials, even to Lavrenty Beria, chief of the NKVD from late 1938, seeking information on Yuri’s condition and whereabouts. For years Anna kept writing but could get no answers. Finally, in 1940, she received an official letter informing her that in 1938 Yuri had been sentenced to an additional ten years “without the right of correspondence” and been sent to a camp deep in Siberia. His last known location was listed as Chibyu, near the Ukhta River. Anna died never learning the truth about her son’s death. He continued to haunt her dreams for the rest of her life. Once she saw him walking through a swamp heading somewhere far away. He was extremely pale and gaunt and turned to look at her with mournful eyes.
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After arriving in Karelia, Boris bounced between camps in Uroksa, Sennukha, and Kuzema. He fell ill in the spring of 1937 and was relieved of heavy forest work. Anna, who had been sending him food and money (the latter never reached him), wrote to Peshkov asking her to help get Boris moved to the gulag hospital at Bear Mountain (Medvezhya Gora, later changed to Medvezhegorsk). Boris had made the same request of the camp officials; failing this, he hoped that maybe he could convince them to send him to the work corridor at the Butyrki. Camp officials ignored their requests, however, and Boris’s condition deteriorated. His legs were swollen from edema, and he could no longer walk. By summer, he was bedridden. He was put on a special diet, however, and his daily intake of calories and animal fats was increased.
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The improved diet and gentler conditions, as well as visits from a few camp doctors later that year, returned Boris to health, and by the end of 1937 he was back in the barracks at Sennukha. He spent the winter out in the deep snow and cold, felling trees in the Karelian forest. By spring his health was broken once again. The edema had returned, his legs swelled, and then his lungs began to fill with fluid, and he had trouble breathing. Anna tried to get him released—but her requests were denied. By early July 1938, Boris knew he was dying. He wrote to his mother and Uncle Pavel Sheremetev to stop sending food since it would only be wasted on him. The last letter he wrote himself was
dated July 9. “As for me,” Boris informed his mother, trying to shield her from the truth, “I will just say that things are as before and I am no worse, though I am getting weaker. In general, my overall condition notwithstanding, I am in good spirits and thank God for everything. I do hope to give my illness a good fight. I so terribly want to get back to you as soon as possible.”
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The swelling in Boris’s arms, legs, and chest grew worse, and by the middle of July he was too ill to write. He dictated to a fellow prisoner a few more letters home. The last was from July 28. He died in his sleep two days later and was buried on August 2 in the Sennukha camp cemetery. He was less than a month away from his forty-first birthday.
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Unaware that Boris was dead, Anna sent him a long letter on July 31 imbued with her deep religious faith and counseling acceptance of God’s will:

If I love you, and you love me, and we both and everyone else loves Him, then we are now under the care and protection of His love. May Christ keep and protect us from everything that is unbearable, grievous, and perplexing. We do not know His will, neither our future nor how our great toil at this hour of our ordeal will be decided. But know it will only be as is best for us. You see, I am calm. [. . .] You know I love you—but God loves you even more, deeper and better, and so you and I must give up our fates to Him to decide.
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Several days later her letter was returned unopened. On the envelope were the words: “No longer in the camp.” Her heart sank, and she expected the worse, thinking this a coded reference to his death. Anna went to Moscow to learn for certain, and there she was informed that Boris had indeed died on July 30. Anna later claimed to have experienced a vision that day. “At dawn on July 30, when Boris’s soul flew away from Sennukha, my room in Vladimir filled with light and I was caressed by some spirit. [. . .] Two souls came to me in my sleep and touched both sides of my face [. . .] Without a doubt, this was all predetermined from the beginning, from the very moment of his conception.”
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Upon returning to Vladimir, Anna held a small memorial service for Boris. One night Boris appeared in her dreams. He was sitting on the road with his hands and feet tied. Anna approached and asked what had happened. He calmly told her that he could move no
farther, he had no way forward, and, pointing to his tied hands and feet, said that her grief was holding him back, making it impossible for him to move on to heaven. Anna recognized she had to accept his death and let him go.

During these difficult years Anna met an old woman in Vladimir. The woman told her she was “a fortunate mother.” Why, Anna asked, where is my good fortune? “Your good fortune rests in the suffering of your children, for this is a candle that forever burns before God,” the woman told her.
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“There still are righteous people in Russia,” the bishop of Kovrov once wrote, “who pray to the Lord for Her salvation. Were there no more righteous people, God would destroy us. Take for example my acquaintance Anna Saburov, the wife of the former governor of St. Petersburg. She lost her husband and father in the revolution, and in 1932 both of her sons were arrested, when she was ill herself, but never once in all her letters to me has she ever cried out to the Lord in protest.”
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The grief over Boris’s death was compounded by the fact that Anna was now alone. On the night of February 22, 1938, the NKVD returned to the Saburov apartment and arrested Xenia. They locked her up in Vladimir’s former monastery for six months. She became ill. First her legs swelled, followed by her entire body, even her face. She developed terrible diarrhea; pussy sores erupted on her scalp, and she had to cut off all her hair. At the end of September, Xenia was moved to Ivanovo. There her interrogator, a man named Belekov, beat her savagely. He pummeled her face, smashing her lips and knocking out many of her teeth, and dragged her around the room by her hair. (He could be seen walking the streets of Ivanovo as a pensioner almost fifty years later.) He kept after her to confess her crimes, but she had no idea what to say since she had never been told what she had been charged with. This went on for weeks. During the beatings Xenia struggled not to lose consciousness or say something that might cast suspicion on anyone else. She only learned of the charge at her trial in early October: espionage and counterrevolutionary activities (Article 58, Section 6). As evidence the NKVD cited her marriage to Page and some German marks found in her apartment sent by an aunt living abroad. She was convicted and sentenced to ten years in a labor camp. “I did not show them
that I was devastated,” Xenia said. “I did not even let my lips quiver, though a flash of cold did run down my spine. They told me I could lodge an appeal. I did. I wrote on the verdict that I did not recognize the charges.”
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On November 21, Xenia received a letter from her mother. It was marked “No. 2.” (Letters were typically numbered; that way the recipient knew when a letter had not gotten through.) Letter No. 1 had contained word of Boris’s death; thus this subsequent letter struck Xenia like a bolt of lightning.

This news about Boris devastated me. You must have written about it in the first letter, which never reached me. The whole time I had a feeling that something had happened and had been having dreams. I’ll write you more about this later, but for now just a few words so that you knew I am with you in heart and soul. I know better than anyone else what B. meant to you and what a loss this is for you. I am humbled by the manner in which you have received this, and am trying to accept this enormous loss in the same way, but at this moment I still cannot come to my senses.

Several days later Xenia wrote again. “Everything that concerns me now seems of secondary importance. None of it’s very important, it all seems so petty.” Xenia could not stop thinking about Boris; she dreamed of him every night. The loss of Boris naturally made her think of Yuri and worry even more about his well-being.
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Both she and her mother continued to believe he was alive.

In late 1938, Xenia learned she would soon be shipped off to a camp in the north. She wrote her mother to send some shirts, undergarments, and sandals. She said was ready for anything: “I completely submit myself to fate.” Xenia ended up in Plesetsk in the Arkhangelsk region. There she spent the next year and a half. It was a difficult place. The camp was full of hardened criminals, and they mocked Xenia, calling her the “Macedonian Princess.” In the winter the temperature dropped to nearly minus forty degrees Fahrenheit. She was put to work moving logs for a new railroad on four hundred grams of bread a day; her feet were covered in nothing but cotton socks and bast shoes. The heavy strain and miserable conditions quickly undermined her health, and she was assigned to the Temporarily Unfit for Labor Brigade and given
a larger ration. She was soon sent back out to work in the forest, but still too weak to fulfill her quota, she was put in a punishment cell, and her rations were cut; the camp officials kept for themselves the food parcels Anna sent her. After Xenia’s release, some of the male prisoners took pity on her and helped her fulfill her work norm, giving her time to rest and warm herself by the fire. This cycle of forest work, illness, rest, recovery, and then return to the forest went on all winter and spring of 1939. On at least one occasion she was close to death, and it was thanks to the kindness of her fellow prisoners, food sent from her mother and Uncle Pavel (coffee, jam, milk, canned vegetables, much of which never reached Xenia), and the begrudging compassion of the camp officials that Xenia survived. She was exceedingly grateful to her mother, but, knowing how little Anna could afford these gifts and how difficult it was for her all alone back in Vladimir, it pained her to accept them. “I value your concern for my needs, both great and small, so very much. How you ease my condition. It is so true, ‘There’s no one like your mother!’ Oh, how I feel that here. Thank you for everything!”
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That spring Anna was also preoccupied with her concern for Yuri. She had been sending him parcels too, but each time they came back marked “Undeliverable.” It had been two years since she had had any word from him, but she refused to give up hope. She kept writing letters to the camp officials, to the gulag administration in Moscow too, begging them for information and pleading for her lost son.
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She never received any answers.

By late May, Xenia’s spirits had revived, in part because of the possibility that she might be freed. She had recently learned that some of the prisoners convicted in Ivanovo around the same time as she had been and for the same charge (Article 58, Section 6) had had their cases reviewed and their convictions overturned. Xenia was intent on writing an appeal to the NKVD and was hopeful of her chances. There was, however, one problem: all appeals had to submitted in triplicate, and there was no writing paper at the camp. And so she would have to wait until she could get paper to make her appeal.

Xenia’s revived mood was also due to her good relations with the other prisoners. Throughout June and July she was out working in the forest, cutting branches and debarking felled trees. It was not easy work, but Xenia was getting on well, thanks to the men who pitched in to help her. Xenia was amazed at their compassion and sympathy. One of them in particular impressed her. He was a Turk, but she called him the Babylonian. He went out of his way to be helpful, to look after Xenia, picking up her ax when she was too tired to go on, finishing her work, and always sharing his rations. She was flattered and fell in love. When he was caught giving her money, he was sentenced to twenty-two days in an isolation cell, which made her love him all the more. “He is despotic, handsome, and smart,” Xenia told her mother, “passionate and good.”
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Xenia was convinced she would have died there had it not been for the Babylonian and some of the other men she had met in the camps. She wrote to her mother:

All these meetings, these random meetings with people, not in some ballroom, but in the middle of a forest, in the middle of the taiga, are so unusual and rare. We experienced so much together that our friendship can, of course, never be broken as if we had met in the circumstances of ordinary life. Even if we may be, so to say, people from different planets, still these relationships will remain “until the grave.”

Anna, who had never been in the camps, found this difficult to understand, and despite everything that had happened to the family, she worried Xenia had let herself become too familiar with a non-Christian Turk. “But we were a hair’s breadth from death!” Xenia tried to explain.

We shared everything—joy and grief, the last crumb of bread, even clothes. Not surprisingly, given such circumstances it’s hard to remain on formal terms. [. . .] Whether in the camp or in exile, everything is completely different. We had found ourselves in such conditions in which one day is equal to a year. The Babylonian and I had been acquainted for six months, yet it felt to me as if it had been an eternity! [. . .] He is so close to me, so dear to me. There is nothing at all alien about him. I understand what you are saying, and you are right, if you look at things from an older point of view, from, say, the perspective of Grandfather and Grandmother—what would they think, what would they say? But could Grandmother have ever thought, or even have imagined, that her granddaughter, with the upbringing I had and the traditions I inherited, would suddenly end up a “lumberjack” in the taiga!? And so one must measure things with a different yardstick here. Of course, I, too, think it necessary that one remain modest, and to a certain point decorum should not be lost. [. . .] Men have shown and still do show me great respect thanks to my “modesty.” I am not vulgar or forward like most modern women, so, dear Mama, you need not worry yourself about me.
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